


A Very, Very, Very Fine House

by leslielol



Category: Justified
Genre: Blowjobs, Friendship, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, Season/Series 06
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-23
Updated: 2015-08-05
Packaged: 2018-04-10 19:11:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 18,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4403888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leslielol/pseuds/leslielol
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The lights are on at the old Givens' place.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> In lieu of another big story of any sort--I don't see myself writing another lengthy thing in the foreseeable future--I've been looking for _something_ to tinker around with for my amusement. So on a lark I went through some of the stuff I'd written and never posted to see if anything was worth salvaging. I've started back into two things--a one-shot where Raylan and Tim talk books, and this, a little thing focusing on time spent at and around Raylan's place in Harlan during the final season. I hope it's enjoyable!  
>  The title is from the song "Our House," of course!  
> "Justified" belongs to its creators and I mean no offense!

Raylan came out of the woods with hordes of crickets singing at his back. He hardly heard them for all that was going on in his mind. He felt like he’d been made a fool, lied to. Arlo probably liked that Raylan, in his youth, was damn near petrified of that shack, built by Arlo’s hands and hidden in the hills. Of all the horrible things he never did there--trafficking girls, slaughtering animals--he had, without a doubt, been laughing at his son. 

If it was summer, and there was sweat in the air instead of snow on the hills, Raylan would be playing audience to the shrill, mechanical screams of cicadas, and not the eerie cricket song. 

_If I was ten,_ Raylan corrected, thinking that only children count in seasons. 

Raylan crossed through the treeline and into the untended grass nearer the house. He threw a look over his shoulder, back at the woods, and was curious how much of the land will be cleared for Markham’s crop. Raylan hoped all of it. 

Circling around the house to the side entrance, Raylan saw a figure illuminated by the dim porchlight. Just a sliver of someone, a shade of human. Raylan had his piece halfway out of his holster before he recognized his company, but drew his sidearm completely out, anyway. Habit, and all. 

It was Tim, stood over the half-burned crate of Arlo’s belongings. His head was bowed slightly, in interest--though Raylan was quick to think otherwise. Raylan wished he hadn’t drank so much last night, forgotten to burn what all was there. The piece that remained stood like a crude memorial. Raylan fought to urge to race over and kick apart the pile, prevent Arlo from earning even half a thought of interest from any living soul. 

Instead, he spotlighted Tim with the flashflight, catching his face and making him squint and bring a hand to his brow. His other, notably, went for _his_ sidearm. 

“You know Markham was giving you shit, calling you my sidekick. Though I may have to concede his point.” Raylan clicked off the flashlight and stopped just shy of being in Tim’s company. “What are you doing here?”

“Forgot my laptop.” Tim raised his voice, mocked the distance Raylan kept between them. He bent at the knee and plucked what he’d been looking at from the pile.

Disgruntled--but not surprised--that Tim wasn’t going to give him this and leave without making a scene, Raylan came closer. “And after retrieving it, you thought you’d go through the burned trash on my lawn?”

Tim grinned at Raylan, and continued to test the weight of the item in his hands. “I’m being honest here--I thought it was goat barbeque. What can I say, I developed a taste for it.” 

“You want to eat that,” Raylan nodded at the machete Tim had retrieved from the burnt remains of Arlo’s crate, “You be my guest.”

Tim unsheathed the machete, drawing out its length to reveal a wide form spreading from a narrow base. He whistled, then tested the blade against the pad of his thumb. It was still sharp. 

“People’d pay a lot of money for one of these. Racist people, but who’s to say their dollars aren’t as American as yours and mine?”

Raylan sighed. He was in no mood for this shit. “Well you’re in luck. That fine piece of Viet Cong craftsmanship can be yours for the low, low price of getting the hell off of my goddamn property.” 

Instantly, Raylan regretted speaking. The disinvitation to stay sounded like a genuine offer of the machete. He didn’t want Tim to have the thing. The previous night, he knew just by looking at the contents of the crate that, logically, some items could be termed relics. But to have Arlo’s things spread out into the world, where there was a chance he could pass by them again? Unacceptable. Raylan wanted it all gone, burnt to ashes.

Tim gave Raylan an easy sort of smile, like he hadn't just been told--in no uncertain terms--to fuck off. “So, were you drunk when you tried to burn through steel? Or just cautiously optimistic?”

Raylan was already pissed that the whole crate hadn’t gone up in flames, and now he had to contend with Tim figuring out what it was he’d been trying to do. He shelved his hands on his hips and looked at Tim, then towards the road, expectant. 

“I drove my father’s car into a lake,” Tim said, unprompted. He was still handling the machete with great interest, but managed to avert his eyes, glance at Raylan, and add: “On purpose, after he died.”

“Yeah?” Raylan squinted at his colleague. The dark smoothed Tim’s harder features. Even the gleam of his reflection in the machete looked childlike. “I can see that.” 

“Mustang. Cherry red, because he was just _that kind_ of maladjusted asshole. Of course, I always wanted to drive it. And he’d beat my ass whether I had or not, so I drove it anyway.” Tim turned to his left, used the machete to hack off a handful of leaves from a sapling. “Could have sold it before I shipped out, but,” he took another swing, landing a branch this time, “Watching it sink to the bottom of Lake Conway had to be more satisfying than a couple grand in my pocket.” 

Tim returned the machete to its casing, then dropped it unceremoniously into the ashen heap. Not everything Raylan did made sense to Tim, but he could respect what he was trying to do, here, and not interfere. 

Raylan nodded minutely, watching the scene. “You want a drink?”

“You have to ask?” Tim perked at the offer, but did not venture into the house without Raylan's lead, first. To the extent that he could, Tim would only follow. 

While Raylan went directly to the kitchen, Tim split off from the foyer and made for the living room. He was familiar enough with this place, having spent nights here while tailing Boyd. He didn't sit or make himself comfortable; again, in deference to what Raylan would allow. 

But if Tim was going to wait for Raylan's say-so on the conversation front, he'd sooner develop lockjaw. He waited until Raylan joined him in the living room and poured two glasses--lest Tim get short changed--before asking, “So what’d he say?”

“Excuse me?” The bottle jerked sideways and Raylan lost a few precious drops to the tabletop. Raylan steadied his hand, a vision of Arlo still weighing heavy on his mind. If Tim was rooting around on his property, it wasn’t impossible that he’d overhead Raylan talking to himself. 

Tim frowned. “Walker. Was the chatty type. I figure he tried to talk you out of shooting him.” Mumbling into the lip of his glass, Tim added, “In the back.”

“He wasn’t much for reason,” Raylan said, ignoring Tim’s slight. He beat back his nerves and took a gulp of bourbon. “Said it wasn’t just about the money. Which, you know. Bull- _shit._ ” 

Tim took a slow sip, himself, and decided against joining Raylan on the couch. Instead, he leaned back against the wall of windows. The sky had cleared itself of clouds, and the moon hung just above Tim’s right shoulder. When he shrugged, it disappeared. “You really think he was going to team up with Boyd, make a play for Markham’s money?” 

“You disagree?”

“Shit, no.” Tim’s posture sunk and the moon returned. “But Walker wanted a way outta these hills. Boyd could have assured him that much.”

Raylan snorted softly. Tim hadn’t seen the pinwheel-eyed look Boyd had given the stacks of money in Markham’s safe. “Boyd wasn’t going to see him to safety until he’d pocketed all that money. And it’s a _shit ton_ of money. Wouldn’t have worked out for Walker, anyway.” 

Tim cocked his head one way, then the other, considering Raylan’s argument. Raylan stretched out into an indecent sprawl on his couch in the meantime, playing like Tim’s whole act was as tiring as it was tired. Tim raised a hand, conceding Raylan’s point. He allowed one final addendum, however: “Maybe Boyd would have had the decency to shoot him in the front, at least.”

It wasn’t a joke. Tim narrowed his eyes when he said it, and set his jaw, after. 

“How about you climb on out of my ass about that, huh? You sound like Walker.” 

Tim turned so that his back faced Raylan. “How ‘bout now? Do I look like him, too?”

“Maybe try firing a few shots over your shoulder with a woman’s handgun.”

When Tim turned back around, his eyebrows were raised. “Christ, that’s specific.” 

Raylan hurled a pillow at him, which Tim easily dodged. He refilled his glass, then Tim’s too, albeit somewhat stingily. “Shit. You remember that $200,000 and change from the evidence locker?”

“Yeah, that your mother of your child stole?”

His glass tipped to his lips, Raylan frowned. “I tell you that?”

Tim kicked back the rest of his bourbon, then threw out his arms. “Why I gotta keep telling you, I’m good at my job.” 

Raylan grinned and nodded at the bottle. Tim poured himself a third. “Yeah, well. Pocket change compared to what Markham’s got. I’m telling you… Boyd wants it. And what Boyd Crowder wants, Boyd Crowder plots and plans and scrapes and deals and kills ‘til he gets it.”

Drink in hand, Tim didn’t make it as far back to the windowed-wall. Instead, he leaned against the dining room table, itself out of place as a part of requisitioned material for the manhunt. There were all manner of chairs and extension cords littering the area. If Tim thought Raylan had any attachment to his childhood home, he might have felt bad about making such a mess of it.

Then again, Tim hadn’t been the one to set fire to the lawn. 

“You still putting all your eggs in the Crowder basket? Just ‘cause you dug coal together, you really figure he won’t pocket the payout he’s got and get gone?”

Raylan looked comfortable on the couch, and if he put away any more bourbon it was likely he’d end up sleeping there. He stared on past Tim, through the windows, like he could see all of Harlan County rolling out before him. “Should have seen the look on his face. He’d sooner die than settle for a cent less.”

“I guess that’s the idea,” Tim drawled, and raised his glass to the notion. He shook his head, then, still quietly bemused at Raylan managing to sever substantial funds from Markham, only to further entice Boyd. “Shit. If I had $100,000 burning a hole in my pocket? I’d be gone.”

Raylan watched Tim's mouth when he talked, and detected the rare happenings of a smile. “If you were Boyd, you mean.”

“If I were Boyd I’d put aside a goodly sum for tattoo removal.” Tim said so without irony of his own misbegotten ink. Then he smiled loopily, much-aided by the bourbon, as he imagined it: the freedom money afforded a man, and the youth to enjoy spending it. “Nope. Just me. Buy a plane ticket and disappear for a while.” 

“Really,” Raylan asked, and smiled wide because he wouldn’t have figured Tim for wishful and flighty. 

Tim took offense to Raylan’s amusement. “I look the stay-at-home type?” 

“I ain't saying I see you building your nest egg, but I would have figured you’d be done with planes.” He moved around on the couch, trying to get comfortable. It was never a thing he'd tried, growing up. There was too much risk in it. He regretted losing that pillow, but sure enough--as soon as he raised his head to ask for it, Tim had lobbed it over. It was a shade shy of white with the image of a fat orange hen stitched on by hand. Raylan fit it behind his shoulder. 

“I wouldn’t jump out of this one," Tim said, not allowing the conversation to lag even a second. He tasted his lips after the bourbon. “Shit, wait. What are we drinking? A hundred grand, I’d buy ‘em out.” 

Raylan raised the bottle again, but Tim shook his head. 

“It’s all yours. I’m heading back tonight.”

Tim drained his glass, then went to the kitchen to refill it with water. He drank it down then filled another, and his departure was further stalled as he returned to his place in the living room, where he took slow sips. 

"What would you do? With that kind of money. Correct answer aside."

No Winona, no baby girl. It ought to be difficult to even imagine, now, but ideas sprang to mind. When he thought of Miami he thought of the beach and the neon-lit nights, not floaties and sandcastles with his child. It worried Raylan how easily one jumped after another, endlessly, no matter how quickly he shot them down. So he went a different route, smiled like he'd imagined only the absurd. "I dunno. Your cult in Mexico still up for grabs?" 

"Is my life's work _up for grabs,_ Raylan?" Tim dropped the affronted act and waved a hand, "Yeah, sure." 

Around them, silence built like a scream: weighty and heavy at first--profound--but soon dragged by expression. Eventually, it was cut with a death blow. 

"You really drive your daddy's car into a lake?"

Tim dropped his gaze to the dregs of water left in his glass. "Why would I lie about doing something so phenomenally stupid? I nearly fucking drowned."

Raylan's eyebrows shot up. "You didn't just cut the breaks, watch it roll?"

Tim smiled, small and serene. "Where's the fun in that?" 

Thoughtlessly, or perhaps because the memory he drew upon now demanded it, Tim took four steps across the room, retrieved the bottle, and poured himself another couple fingers of bourbon. He felt Raylan looking at him a split second before realizing what he'd done. A wave of red warmed his cheeks, but quickly passed. Tim looked at what he'd poured for himself--no small helping, but a tidy sum. He wanted to drink it down. He did.

“Sleep it off here,” Raylan said, watching Tim's throat so that he could time his comment while Tim was still overcome by the bourbon's slow burn. 

Tim's voice was hoarse when he asked, “Again?” 

\- 

“He is _so_ in love with you.”

Raylan completed a singularly long lick of his ice cream. “I know.”

“He’s warm for your form.”

“Mhm.”

“Had to buy you that ice cream just to cool the fire in his loins.”

“This ice cream went nowhere near anybody’s loins.”

“His balls clinch for you, man.”

“Haven’t heard that one before.”

Tim threw his head back, grinned but didn’t laugh. “I ain’t even shiting you, felt like I was chaperoning your date.” 

They left the diner only having sewed seeds of doubt in Avery Markham who, for such a shrewd character, kept flighty company. His men weren't to be trusted and neither was his wife-to-be. It was fast becoming an ugly trend, Raylan thought. The type to send a man spiraling, throwing out all limbs, grasping for control. And Raylan meant to see Markham leave Kentucky, tail between his legs, having learned that lesson a dozen times over, if need be. 

Seeing the clear night sky and spread of stars that seem to position themselves just above the flattened hilltops, Raylan thought he could start to imagine why Markham had sights on this place. It was quiet, for a change. 

But Raylan was giving Harlan too much credit. It was late, after all, and he and Tim had been driving around in search of Markham all night, with Tim spotting the car in the diner's lot after they'd agreed for a second time, _just once more around. The backstreets, now._

Raylan brought his gaze back down to earth and saw Tim holding out a hand out for the car keys.

“You ain’t driving,” Tim said. He'd seen how Raylan got sometimes, cell phone in one hand, ice cream cone in the other, the wheel long forgotten. Ice cream and the sound of his own voice took priority. 

“I am,” Raylan countered, “On account of you digging at your eyes like you’re looking to strike gold.” And, _hell,_ he was nearing the cone, anyway. There was less need for concentration at the cone.

Tim circled around to the driver's side, firm in his decision. “I’ll be fine if you enlighten me as to your budding courtship with that little cowpoke in there. That there was no meet cute--it was a certifiable _second date._ Go on, all the gorey details. That’s sure to light my fire.”

“Christ,” Raylan said, and threw the keys like he meant to do harm. Tim ducked slightly and caught them.

“He only has eyes for you," Tim grinned, not letting up. "That bowl cut, for you. Those six hairs on his lip--yours."

Raylan thought he was bound for this kind of treatment the entire drive back to Arlo's, but Tim was genuinely beat. While he managed to stave off any tell-tale yawns, it was only at the expense of being quiet. 

Tim had grown familiar enough with Harlan--or, at the very least, knew how to get back to their makeshift command post in a pinch. He took off the main road and split their driving time between two different shortcuts that Raylan figured maybe shaved five minutes or so off of their travel time. He’d forgotten that, when he wasn't tailing Raylan, Tim had been busy following Boyd, documenting his movements, and remaining unseen. 

They rolled up onto Raylan's property and Raylan found himself--again--rethinking his offer to Loretta McCready. There were ways to handle Markham and his people, should they continue to pose a threat to her and the business she sought to establish. But there would always be some men thinking they could take from this young girl. Men who saw her as nothing but an obstacle to be removed, not a force to withstand. Raylan didn't doubt Loretta could hold her own, but he saw a future for her now that looked a great deal like the past. 

These thoughts hounded Raylan until he stepped inside the house, and all the ugly memories packed therein. Unlike before, Tim harbored no pretense about awaiting an invitation before following him inside. 

“You still thirsty?” Raylan asked, though he wasn't sure why he bothered. Tim looked ready to drop onto the couch and sleep a deceptively fitful four hours. He perked right up at Raylan's offer, though, and looked over with interest. 

“Like a fish.”

“Anything besides coffee,” Raylan echoed Tim’s request at the diner, the one that had gone clear over the waiter’s head, porkpie hat and all. He handed him the bottle of bourbon he'd stashed in the pantry, figured Tim knew where the glassware was and could help himself. But Tim didn't so much as consider a glass; he drank healthily from the bottle.

Raylan flicked the brim of his hat back, amused. “That good, huh?”

Tim tipped forward and kissed Raylan. Raylan opened to him with the practiced ease of the familiar, and the sweetness of the vanilla cone was quickly lost under the warm breath of bourbon.

Directly into his mouth, Tim replied: “Mmhm.” 

It was something about this house, Raylan thought, because he and Tim had shared many a bored night, none too few dingy hotel rooms, and nothing such as this had so much as lit their minds, let alone actioned their bodies. Stationing Boyd Crowder in their sights put Raylan's home in their back pocket. As much as the surveillance gear and their sidearms, it was a part of the hunt. 

From the day Tim arrived with his orders--and a sleeping bag under one arm--something like this started creeping towards reality. Wrapped tight with proximity and with it, new understandings, it was the kind of thing Raylan still couldn't put a pin in. Even open-mouthed to the thing itself, all reason eluded him. He couldn't so much as venture a wild guess at it until it happened, that first time, drunk after the failure to catch Boyd in the act of robbing a bank. Tim had still driven them back to Lexington, after, and was on Raylan's mind the whole time--and not for the simple fact that he really shouldn't have been driving. 

The second time clinched it. And now, well.

Raylan felt himself quickly warm to Tim, found his hand on Tim's sidearm because it was as close to his dick as he was going to get without first having his say. 

“We really doing this again?”

Tim didn't smile, as far as Raylan could see. He stood pressed to Raylan and had no trouble locating the man's fly and working it open. The bottle of bourbon was lost somewhere--Raylan sure as shit wasn't keeping an eye on it.

Tim’s voice was loose, like his wetted tongue had a say in the proceedings. “You keep asking me that like you’re looking for me to say no.”

Tim let his broad hands travel along the spread waist of Raylan's jeans. His fingers dropped in, touched the softer skin stretched below his belly, along his narrow hips. Half a second later, Raylan felt Tim’s hands on him--his dick, his balls. Tim wasn’t shy. 

Raylan grinned. “I’m just checking in.”

“I tell you what, you ask me that two more times, I’ll give you a free one.” 

He didn't drop to his knees; this wasn't going down like the first time. That was how Raylan thought of things with Tim, now. Would it be like the first time, where Tim did all the work? Or the second, where Raylan instigated things, got his reward, then eagerly responded? 

“Think about it,” Tim added. “Ain’t a bad deal.”

"We're doing this two more times now?" Raylan tried to make light. 

"That counts as one," Tim said. Raylan was hard, now, but Tim abandoned the opportunity to start and end things where they stood. He steadied his hand and favored Raylan with just a few soft strokes. 

Raylan kissed him, this time. The touch was too feather-soft and eerily gentle to experience without extending a swift thank-you. 

Tim broke away and plucked the bottle from the counter behind Raylan. “You know I ain’t drunk, yet,” he said, his tone short, like he was laying down the law. “Though, I suppose if you want to play it like before, you’d better have a go.”

He held out the bottle.

Raylan wanted to laugh, but didn’t. It would necessitate explaining to Tim that he’d heard such an ultimatum decades ago, from another man’s lips wet with a taste of something strong. It didn’t seem so funny a prospect, then, that here he was twenty years later--in the same shadows of these hills, pulling the same foolhardy stunts with another man, a bottle between them. 

Instead, Raylan said: “See, it’s that, right there. The attitude.” 

“I’m just teasing ‘cause it stirs you up.” Tim’s voice had a funny way of sounding like it wasn’t coming out of him at all, like maybe it was someone else, shouting from a distance. Strong to cover the distance, but worn thin by its arrival. He lowered his head, made a show of being more interested in what Raylan had between his legs than whatever it was he had on his mind. 

“You drop the attitude, I promise I can still get stirred up. Why don’t you try bein’ a little sweeter toward me?” 

Tim took another swig from the bottle. His bottom lip came away wet and he shared the taste with Raylan. He issued what sounded just shy of a threat, after. 

“There’s nothin’ sweeter’n this mouth.”

Tim shoved a knee against one of Raylan’s, forcing him to widen his stance. His hands were all over him again, and Raylan knew if he didn’t interject now, they’d be doing this against the fridge, like the first time. He was certain he still had the bruises down his spine. “Bedroom?”

Tim’s eyebrows shot up, but he complied quickly: “Alright.” 

\- 

They dozed off, after--just a few minutes, nothing more than physical exhaustion twinned with relief. Tim woke himself, rolled off of Raylan, worked and rubbed his jaw. 

Tim took a moment to case the room. Like the rest of the house, it was an old, detailed piece of work. In the delicately rendered window panes and hardwood door molds, Tim saw the kind of money Arlo had been into, once upon a time. He used it to make a castle in pleasant country, a transparent move if ever there was one. 

The space itself made Tim wonder about Raylan’s mother, Frances, keeping up with it all on her own. 

Wakefulness found Raylan, too, in Tim’s absence. Raylan stretched, huffed a laugh when he realized what they’d done, _after_ what they’d done. Even with Tim sat over the corner of the bed, he still felt compelled to ask, “What are we even doing?”

Tim glanced back at him, then waved a hand to indicate Raylan’s highly specific state of undress: unzipped jeans, underwear worked low on his hips, shirt and all else otherwise untouched. “You want I should show you again--?” 

“I mean--Christ. _Why._ ”

“Lack of viable alternatives, I assumed.” Tim stood and adjusted his own jeans, drawing them up from where they bunched at his thighs. “Come on, it’s a no-brainer. You’re easy.” 

Tim thought the terms--though never made explicit--were fairly clear. Knowing Raylan’s proclivity towards errant affairs, Tim naturally wanted to twist and play the conversation so that they didn’t speak of it again. “We’ll take it on the road--sexual gratification on the side of a shit-detail. The people will marvel." 

Raylan closed his eyes. “I thought you were tired.”

Tim stared at him now that he had the opportunity to do so with impunity. Raylan had moved a hand to rest on the exposed skin of his stomach. Tim imagined the ring on his finger felt cold, like it had when pressed against the back of his head, but Raylan didn’t seem disturbed by it. “Is that my cue to hit the couch?” 

Raylan peeked open one eye. "Is that your way of asking to tuck in with me?"

“Oh, I wouldn’t dream to even _presume_ …” Tim started, and he was teasing again. But his gaze turned hard and he looked away, a sharp left towards the bedroom window. As Raylan started to sit up, Tim extended a hand, halting his movements. 

“Hold it,” he said, then zipped up his jeans and secured his weapon from the bedside table. All the while, his head was cocked to one side. Raylan sat up further, to his elbows, then made a grab for his own sidearm. He studied Tim, unsure of what was coming. Tim never quite raised his weapon. 

Slowly, he said, “Your gentleman caller is a persistent one.”

Raylan dropped back against the bed, more annoyed than concerned, now. “Fucking weirdo.”

“He ain’t coming to the door, just scoping the place out.” Tim’s voice was firm; he was back on the job. There was only a shadow and the gleam of the pistol Markham’s latest muscle favored traveling along the side of Raylan’s house, but it was more than Tim needed to make a positive ID--and less than he needed to secure a target. The kid was not being especially careful about his snooping, and Tim’s surprised he didn’t just come knocking. “Hey, he’s poking around your smoldering lawn ash, too.”

“So I got a type, then?”

“Looks that way.” 

Tim continued to stand watch, though Raylan never once considered joining him. There was enough light in the room for Tim to be seen at the window, and Raylan didn’t want to be a part of that picture. He was sure Tim had his number on this one, but he had a hand in it, too--literally. Raylan assumed Tim extending a steadying hand, as well as more-or-less telling him to stay put, was an effort to not draw attention to the window with any further movement. He knew better, but--it was a simple, comforting solution. 

“Aaaand, there he goes.” Tim turned back to face Raylan. He’d lost his jacket somewhere in the bedroom, and his silhouette seemed strangely slight in just a long-sleeved shirt and jeans. His hair was mussed at the sides where Raylan had got his hands into it. And he still looked tired. "I'm kind of disappointed. Thought he'd at least fondle your plants."

“Maybe he fucked the mailbox,” Raylan said, then shrugged off his boots and jeans, and sat up to attend to the buttons on his shirt. Tim watched him, briefly, before holstering his weapon and leaving the window for the door. 

“I’m not asking you to check,” Raylan called after him, which got Tim stalled in the doorway with a grin.

“I thought if I hurried, I’d catch him in the act. Something to see.”

“All the necessary upward propulsion,” Raylan agreed. It’d be a sight.

Tim rubbed at his eyes again, obscured his smile while doing so. He could be imagining the bizarre display, but Raylan didn’t think so. The sole source of light in the room was an old lamp on the bedside table. The bed and walls glowed warm while the carpeted floor near about disappeared into the pressing dark. And then there was Raylan, half-naked, stripping a sock from his foot. 

No, Tim was not in a hurry anywhere.

“You want to sleep here?”

Tim dropped a step back into the room, but it was only to take hold of the doorknob. Raylan quickly realized he’d overplayed his hand. Tim served him a blank look, first, but had the wherewithal to tack on a smile after the fact. It was a breath away from conditioning; Tim knew Raylan liked a reward for his good behavior. 

“I want to sleep.” Tim said so in a tone like he was responding to an offer of making a blanket fort and fucking until it came down. It was tired, but came with another uncertain smile. “So, no. Thanks.”

“Night, then,” Raylan said while drawing off his plaid button-down.

“Yep,” Tim said, and closed the door to the one-man show that was _Raylan Givens._

\- 

In the morning, Raylan brought down Tim’s jacket from the bedroom. He’d found it on the floor. Tim was drinking coffee at the kitchen table, his laptop open to arrest records of Markham’s over-eager hire, Boon. Raylan leaned over him to get a look at what he’d found.

“Nothing surprising,” Raylan concluded after a short purusing of the collected citations and misdemeanors.

“Okay,” Tim drawled, and snapped his laptop shut. “Now it’s your turn to go work on something for three hours, and I’ll come ‘round and demean it.” 

Raylan smiled and dropped Tim’s jacket into his lap. “Found that.”

“I know where I left it."

Raylan was not deterred; he’d get the barest glimpse of appreciation, yet. "Brought it down for you, then." He leaned in close to say so, and his lips brushed Tim's cheek. 

"Well ain’t you a peach.”

Tim slid sideways out of his chair, leaving the room and taking his jacket with him. 

\- 

Their morning dragged on through lengthy stints of waiting, punctuated only by freshened cups of convenience store coffee. Boyd’s men got a late start covering the decoy van meant to move Markham’s money. Rather than keep their cover, Raylan left the car in favor of a patch of green across the street. Tim figured Raylan for thinking the ploy was a foolish one, or was never going to succeed, anyway. 

So Tim joined him in the mid-morning sun, balanced precariously on a dilapidated stretch of fence, eager to hear what revelation he had now about the apostle Boyd Crowder, key figure in the church of _Blowing Shit Up In The Pursuit of Stealing Other Shit._

"Last night, you said..." 

Tim continued on, asking after Boyd, his schemes, and the case at hand, but Raylan hardly listened. It was as though a switch had been flipped in his mind--Tim, last night, and those handfuls of nights previous. What they were doing--the very concept, if not the particulars of each act--suddenly settled heavy in Raylan’s mind, then expanded, _exploded_ and was all he could think about. Raylan even grasped at prospective consequences--not a thing he often concerned himself with, but was inexplicably drawn to, now. Were there any?

He thought of Ava and the kiss they shared, and wondered why he and Tim were able to go further.

Probably because Tim hadn’t started with a kiss. 

Raylan traded words with Tim on the fence, then carried on with Rachel and Vasquez by phone. He felt like he existed on the periphery of every conversation, despite being the one to lead them. 

He frowned--instinctively--when Tim talked to him. Tim said simple things like how he hoped this case would end in a trial, if only as pay off for all their work. He warned Raylan about not killing Boyd simply because he imagined that’s how it would happen; Boyd would have to do more than ask for it, he’d have to demand that end. Not in so many words, of course, but Tim got his point across. 

Every word was a disappointment, and not solely because each was designed to reign Raylan in, to limit his expectations, and remind him of his duties. Raylan wanted to hear Tim speak with the same kind of certainty with respect to what it was they’d done. Raylan felt like Tim was hoarding puzzle pieces, and purposefully denying him a full picture. 

In a moment alone in the car, Raylan put his hand on Tim's thigh. It was a gesture born of raucous thought and zero deliberation, but its execution was easy. Just testing it out, riding the runoff from the previous night's activities. Tim was now like he was then: firm, warm. Raylan liked having a hold of him.

"Dude."

Tim’s tone removed the hand; he didn’t so much as move an inch or blink, yet it was a complete and total refusal. Raylan lifted and drew back his error like the limb itself had been bitten clean off. 

It was more explanation, Raylan supposed, than he’d really wanted. And it was this: outside of the house, they were not to toy with it. They were not to acknowledge what they'd done or would continue to do. At least, that was the ideal. Tim drew in a breath through his nose, getting a good whiff of what he had to figuratively step over: the dead thing Raylan had left at his feet, the battered notion of what was once a neat little setup. 

"Don't think too hard on it, okay?" Tim was almost gentle in this, his revised let-down. "It's real simple."

"I hate this," Raylan said, and although he felt both embarrassed and spoiled, he kept his tone dull. It hovered over everything, unaffected. "And you're great at it."

"It's not my favorite, neither," Tim heard himself shoot back. Something in him sensed his pride should to be hurt but, really, it wasn't. Whoring around with straight men just seemed the kind of thing he ought to take offense to. Tim allowed that term for Raylan only to the extent that Raylan hadn't told him otherwise. 

There was only a body of evidence against him, nothing Raylan hadn't come away from clean in the past. 

"But what's the alternative? Not getting your dick sucked? Come on. That's crazy talk." Tim smiled at him now, wicked and wild, giving Raylan what Tim thought would bring him back on board: a little effort. 

Tim said, "Buck up there, you." 

He said, “It’s just a choice."

But Tim knew he'd already lost some part of Raylan, the part that wanted to be liked as surely as he wanted to be pleasured. The part, too, that occupied the place where the vague distinction between _what they were doing_ and _doing what they wanted_ formulated and met. Raylan didn't know yet that getting both wasn't worth the heartache. Tim's, if he did the math right. 

After a time, it became great tingly apparent that Raylan wasn't thinking on Tim's commentary; he didn't answer Tim with so much as an affirmation of that choice, or so little as a comeback. He let a yawning silence spill between them, and imagined it as some representation of his virtue: not anything he sought or claimed, but some miracle he saw happening outside himself. Raylan presume it was the Right Thing, because he didn't much like it, but there it was, done.

At last, he straightened his hat. Then he spoke. 

"It's strange. Doing it this way." 

Raylan pontificating on the situation was nothing short of a death blow, and any forthcoming conversation was its eulogy. As it stood, Tim could only defend what they'd done, and his part instigating it. 

"You didn't have these complaints going live, as they say."

"I live in the moment."

Tim bit the inside of his cheek, crippling some half-formed, tightlipped smile. "If you got a hang-up about it, Raylan, we'll stop. Like I said... it's real simple."

It didn't feel that way, now. When they were in the thick of it, of course Raylan would be inclined to agree--what was ever confusing about feeling good? Given time to think on it, however, and to see it come under the glaring light of day left Raylan feeling jilted. It didn't strike him as some terrible secret, save for the fact that neither man spoke a word of it. But there was something inherently perplexing as to their behavior--not individually, experienced at varying distances, but partnered, now, and under one solitary roof.

"I am uncertain," Raylan allowed. They turned left down a familiar street, and sunlight cut through Tim's side of the car. 

"Okay," Tim said, squinting against the glare and very much not giving a shit one way or the other. Together, it made for a sour look. "So I'll just let you work on that, then."

Raylan breezed through a stop sign, itself adorned with a rusted stripe of orange-brown ruin down the north-facing side of its metal spoke. There was nothing on either side of them except sun and sky, and Raylan lamented that driving in Harlan never really got a man anyplace in particular. He rapped his ring finger on the wheel, wanting the solid, dull sound it gave. He glanced sidelong at Tim. "You think it's over?"

Tim fished his sunglasses out of his pocket and drew them on. A gifted pair, he liked to think. 

"Pretty sure you're the one to tell me." Raylan snorted softly at the display, which didn’t sit too well with Tim. "What? You drove into the fucking sun." 

The road stretched out ahead of them, first asphalt turned grey-white with age, until it broke into dirt and rock, then only flattened, dead grass. Raylan took the turn for his own dusty driveway, visible now only due to a dry fall and early winter. With the right conditions, Raylan had known it to be a grassy strip, a verifiable bluegrass road so wholly unlike the yellow brick one in his mother's favorite film, it was near laughable. 

The car was rocked by the uneven terrain, and Tim was anxious to leave Raylan's stylish vehicle for his own, hardier model. As a rule, Tim didn't like driving around in the sleek town car. One unlucky pothole, slick side street, or hard turn taken too soft and they'd surely flip or spin out or otherwise intern themselves to either a quick death or a long recovery. Tim picked at a band of stitching along the interior. The Italian leather, though, was nice. 

The thought of wrecking the car soon found its necessary partner: the prospect of dying on some stretch of dirt road. It crossed Tim's face visibly, settled heavy on his brow but was hid mostly behind his sunglasses. A crease put itself square between his eyes, like an ax chipping into stone. 

Raylan harbored no such thoughts; his mind was still in the bedroom, swimming in bourbon and buoyed by Tim’s expert touch. "Give me your read of the situation, then."

“I think you're infinitely too pleased with yourself to put the brakes on a thing like this," Tim said, each word sharp and decisive where Raylan's were coy, "So you'll come back for more. I'm not a nice fella, but maybe my year's been a little dry, and _maybe_ I indulge you." 

Tim waited until they'd rolled to a stop before finishing, because seeing the most single-minded, self-assured asshole he knew sat waiting for his word on the subject was some kind of victory, no matter the outcome. "But with none of this coming back my way? On account of your… uncertainties?"

Tim exited the car. The house loomed over them, unchanged from earlier that morning. His SUV was parked around back, and Tim would take it the way they'd come, tail Boyd's men and pray to a vengeful God that all their preceding idiocy has been preparing them for this, a mass exodus of dumb-fucking-ideas. Steal the armored vehicle, force it off road, threaten its drivers--Tim saw no outcome wherein he didn’t get to wing a couple of dumbasses for his trouble.

Raylan exited the car, too, but kept on his side. "What's not coming back to you?"

Tim stopped dead, turned on his heel; there was not a man alive who would let that go unchallenged. 

"You want to argue that blowjobs and handjobs are one in the same, Raylan? Hell, I'd settle for having my _mind_ blown, at least." 

"Ah," Raylan said, a little shamefaced. "So you ain't saying _time of death,_ but..." 

"We got that tangy, pre-death smell." 

Raylan held up his hands, accepting that. 

Tim frowned at the display. He frowned harder, thinking now that he had to piss, and that would take him back into Raylan’s house, if only for a minute. And where would his dramatic exit be, then, joined with an inevitable wet spot on his jeans? 

“It’s always after the fact with you.” 

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

"Forget it," Tim said, and glared at the house from behind his aviators. “I gotta piss.” 

“Anywhere’s fine,” Raylan waved a hand at his birthright, this property that seemed to have colluded with the fates to draw their alliance, then shred any resolve for keeping it. 

When Tim returned from the bathroom, his jeans spot-free, Raylan was waiting for him. He was propped up against the driver’s side door, his boot kicked back and dirtying the front left tire. His arms were folded across his chest, the worn denim of his jacket posing no obstacle. His head was bent slightly; not thrown back into the sunshine and relaxed, but pitted forward in that perpetual angle geared towards his phone. All that changed when Tim approached--Raylan pocketed his phone, smiled, and looked at ease. 

Which meant one of two things: he’d figured out what he wanted to say, or figured out that he’d never say it. Tim was more familiar with the latter; it meant putting on a friendly face while willing what they’d done out of their conscious selves. Putting the proverbial drill to one’s cranium, and smiling.

"I didn't even know you were gay.” Tim snorted at the obvious lie, but Raylan continued, "Even with your mouth on me, I still had my doubts." 

"Your opinion of yourself is just _that high."_

Raylan slid to the left, putting his back against the door handle and blocking Tim’s way. The wide brim of his hat threw a shadow across the bridge of his nose, narrowing it. It was as if nature itself thought it could stand to improve Raylan's good looks--a wild improbability. 

"You do this for other guys?"

Something could stand to improve his manners, though. 

There were other means of getting into his own vehicle, but Tim refused to be made to compromise. He planted his feet ahead of his door, certain that Raylan would move, or be moved, by diplomacy or force. Tim wouldn't say which he'd rather.

"Mostly, Raylan, I do it for me."

Tim said it to be smart, but the sentiment was as honest as anything he'd ever offered up on the subject, and Raylan took it to heart. He nodded, thoughtful. "Well, what's worth doing is worth doing well. And you do it really, goddamn well."

"You can thank the United States Armed Forces for that. Taught me everything I know." Another truth, but it sounded contrite. Tim inclined his head slightly, wordlessly reminding Raylan there was an armored van out there that required their supervision. 

"Availability, you said. Lack of viable alternatives." 

That, suddenly, _was_ something Tim took offense to. Soft asides hinting at the idea that he might not really be anything like what he does, that the latter isn’t a reflection--even a small one--of who he is. It was a cheap shot, blindly taken. And that was Raylan’s saving grace, to a degree--such poor marksmanship wasn’t like him. 

Tim put on the same stale smile he knew he’d be tired of looking at and said, "If I sound like a broken record, here, it’s ‘cause you got a favorite song: don't think on it."

Raylan looked poised to lob some silly remark right back-- _It’s such a catchy tune_ \--but his expression quickly changed, drew in on itself until pinched. And his voice dogged after his look, so he was short with Tim when he said, a challenge, "So it's only you who gets to know what he's doing.”

That was fair. 

Tim even shifted where he stood, turned at the hip slightly, like Raylan’s complaint was so endowed with merit that it could express itself physically against an opponent. And while Tim appreciated Raylan’s opinion, he found the sentiment dull. Maybe even false. "Seemed to me you appreciated the element of surprise." 

Raylan’s pinched look snared itself on that particular fact, and from it a wry little smile was wrenched into being. He moved, brought his foot down from against the tire so that both of his boots crushed the deadened grass in his driveway. “It’s hard to negotiate--"

"When you got your mouth full?" Tim finished for him. "Hey, ain't that my line?" He shot a hand out and took hold of the door handle. With enough force, Tim could easily draw Raylan off the car, sit himself inside it, and go about his day. He closed in on his partner, but that was as far as his combined resolve, confidence, and sense of due return took him. 

“You don’t,” he said, “Have to explain yourself, or give me a reason. That falls in line with the whole… _this doesn’t need talking about_ thing. Kind of a selling point, really.” Tim opened the door a few inches, nothing so much as to make Raylan lose his footing or jolt him from his position against the car, but as sure a signal for his departure as Tim could relay. “Anyway. It was fun.” 

Raylan threw back an elbow, closing the door.

“I do,” he said in a mumble, “Want to touch you again.”

It earned him a small, if annoyed smile. An accompanying roll of Tim’s eyes went unseen from behind his aviators.

“Alright.” Tim tried not to sound too pleased. “Maybe let me go and do my job, first, so I can feel like I’ve earned it?”

Raylan ducked his head to hide his widening smirk. Then he slowly--but surely--stepped away from Tim’s vehicle, allowing him to pass. He held his arm out like he meant to show Tim to his gold-encrusted chariot.

Tim hit him with an unexpected high-five, cheered, “Dicks, yeah.” 

"One last thing--" 

And Tim when turned back around, only a shoulder into his open vehicle, Raylan was there, materialized in his space. Raylan gripped Tim, cupped _everything,_ and gave a squeeze. If he thought he’d lose his hand touching Tim’s leg, earlier, grabbing his balls was asking for all that, and so much worse. Raylan didn’t let up until both Tim’s stare and dick turned hard.

He promised, sure and slow, "I'll get you later."


	2. Chapter 2

Moonlight spilled through clouds over the terrain, then drew back in on itself, shy. Weak-topped trees scattered what light made it through the higher atmosphere, drank it in greedily although it was a poor substitute for sunshine. The more prominent needle-wracked trees fumbled their gift and instead held to their healthy darkness, their perpetual black-green coloring. Beechwoods and the terrain would have lit up; Virginia pines and thinning bald cypress trees--nothing. They were shadow within shadow, a bloated occurrence. Combined, their effect was a cool night made heavy, swollen, and black. 

Cut between the trees was a sliver of black road, and a lone man walked along the median there, heading south. In a dark, empty stretch of hills it wasn’t unusual for a man to be armed against danger--man or nature or, if the local abductee community was to be believed, otherwise. Protection was weaponry and a temper. It was four-wheel drive and a good last name. This man had nothing to protect himself besides a gun--cold comfort should a logging truck come swinging around a narrow turn. 

Instead, he was near about accosted by an SUV, a model newer than anything these hills had seen in years. People still whispered about corvettes and the odd BMW like they were urban legends. The SUV was no ghost--the man in the street felt a verifiable rush of air as it passed, then stopped quick ahead of him. 

Nearly took his hat clean off. 

The SUV’s window rolled down and a familiar voice called out, “Where are you supposed to be right now?” 

What a thing it was, that Tim Gutterson had capitalized his search on those slivers of light, veered left and followed the darkness instead, and there found Raylan Givens. 

Stiff-backed even against the growing cold, Raylan chose to ignore his tailgater, although it did him little good. He kept walking so that he met--and eventually passed--Tim's stalled vehicle. 

Tim hit the gas and jolted forward, leapfrogging Raylan’s progress. “Let me rephrase that--where do Art and Rachel expect you to be?”

Raylan didn’t so much as turn to look at him. He said, “You ought to keep on driving, Tim.”

“I ought to run you over,” Tim fired back, but settled for driving daringly close to Raylan’s middle-of-the-road stride. “Run you over, put you in my trunk and collect. The price on your head or the 10 million, whichever.” 

When his taunts were not met, Tim raised the windows and sped ahead, make a sharp evasive maneuver and positioned the vehicle to block Raylan’s path. There, he swung open the passenger side door. “Get in.”

Through the artificial light in the car, they exchanged a look, something stern on both ends, but unspoken. Tim figured if Raylan was going to pull this kind of stunt, he must have thought it worthwhile. Raylan thought the same thing, and imagined little of Tim _actually_ bringing him in like a fugitive. Hell, Raylan had a good 48 hours before that was the case. 

He was gifted with, instead, visions of Tim's career going the same route as his own: an upstanding young Deputy turned lawless troublemaker, dogged by the odd official inquiry and the constant, soft investigation of office gossip. It wasn’t the worst fate imaginable, and Tim had done things in collusion with Raylan that put him far beyond that point, anyway. But still, it was a reminder why Raylan tended to go at these things alone. 

Raylan got into the car, and although it was of no consequence, his first thought was that Tim smelled. Nothing awful, just the warm stench of a body sat over-long in clothes. In a bed, on a couch, the smell might have been nice. Here, under the artificial warmth of the heater, rain hovering in the air outside, it was something else entirely. 

“Where you headed?” Tim asked, his tone short. But there was that smile--a hard pressed little twist of a thing that made Raylan's ball clinch. Under different circumstances, that smile could lead to something spectacular.

“The house, first. Unless you want to do me a solid and lend me this?” Raylan lazily patted the dashboard. Tim would never part with his ride, much less to allow _Raylan_ driving privileges. 

“Or you could just accept my presence as back-up…” Tim let the offer stand, but knew Raylan wouldn't have it. He sighed, started back on the road. “'Course not. Foresight would be foolish.” 

It was a half hour drive from where they were, stalled in the middle of nowhere--Raylan's place was just _south_ of nowhere--and Tim couldn't keep quiet for more than half that time. 

“All this lying, sneaking around,” _all the on-the-side head._ He smirked, said, “You remind me of an ex.”

“Girlfriend?” Raylan prompted--a genuine question. 

Tim made a face that wasn’t-a-face, like it was beyond him why Raylan would even seek confirmation on a thing like that. 

“S _ure,”_ he drawled, purposefully opaque. 

“Well, you’ve never said.” Even Raylan's comment that very morning-- _I didn't even know you were gay_ \--had gone unmet. Tim had merely thrown Raylan's mighty high self-image back in his face, but had done nothing to confirm his own. 

“In that case,” Tim said, obliging him, “No.”

"Hmm."

Tim pulled over. It was neither a delicate nor subtle thing, but sudden and violent. Tim turned hard, dropped a heavy foot on the breaks, and felt the full force of his vehicle grinding down on gravel and dirt along the grassy shoulder. Raylan, who wasn't wearing his seatbelt, had to throw an arm out to steady himself. 

So he was already staring, bemused but creeping towards angry, when Tim physically turned to address him. Had they been stood outside the car, or sat side-by-side at their desks, Raylan didn't doubt Tim would have preferred to grab him by the shoulder, or force his chair around. Tim wanted an audience of Raylan, his complete attention. 

He had it, now, and it would not be wasted. 

“I have sucked your dick on no fewer than half a dozen occasions, got a return on my investment maybe half the time--” Tim paused in his diatribe, his expression hard and unreadable, but not without its usual shade of menace. “And you still think this-- _you_ \--specifically you, are a point of convenience? Man, there are three brothels along _this road_ alone.”

It was the first time Tim allowed himself an uncensored response to Raylan's antics, preferring always to keep cool when Raylan ran hot. But he could no longer bite his tongue; it was one thing to want to talk about what they were doing, it was another entirely to refuse to listen. And to be blind to the ordeal altogether was surely unacceptable. 

Coolly, like he hadn't just had his stomach thrown a foot out of him with Tim's abrupt detour, Raylan said, “I didn’t want to presume.”

“A gay thing. You’re doing a profoundly gay thing.”

“Profoundly,” Raylan repeated back to him, with interest. 

It wasn't often that Tim took a tone--any tone--that wasn't steamrolled flat or desert-dry. Tim was in rare form and this, his bald-faced derision that Raylan could still confuse what they were doing after all the goddamn _talking_ they'd done after it, was a rare display. 

A tiny smile forged itself on Raylan's face, and he didn't bother hiding it. At the first crinkle of lip and glimmer of teeth, Tim knew he was being played. 

His own mouth twisted but resolve unbroken, Tim grit out, “You got another word for what I did to you?”

Raylan's smile threatened to break into a full-blown grin. “Profound about covers it.”

"And this is why we don't talk about it," Tim said, drawing back from the places his outburst had taken him. He eyed the road, ignored the man sat to his right, and everything that now stood heavy between them. For some who had been in similar circumstances, often exactly these--watching Tim drive down some dangerous stretch of dirt to nowhere in particular--the details proved too much. It was only a fantasy until someone admitted its brush with reality.

They were fast approaching the house. In the encroaching familiarity of the landscape, Tim saw his options shrink. 

“Tell you what, I’ll make you an offer. Instead of a blatantly illegal thing, why don’t we--”

“You can't come," Raylan nodded to the star at Tim's hip, "And that's why."

"Like I'm gonna blow your cover?" Tim asked, purposefully missing Raylan's point. He’d noticed Raylan wasn’t carrying his own piece of tin, but didn’t ask after it. He thought the lack of a car was a bigger giveaway that Raylan was stepping out as far as he could go. He didn't want eyes on him now more than ever. "If you're looking to go incognito, I got some news to break to you." 

Tim eyeballed the hat. It was a well he often drank from, not because the water was so sweet but because it was damn plentiful. 

It started to rain. Tim didn’t bother clearing his windshield of the dotting droplets; there were hardly enough to merit his attention, much less any action. All they produced was a slick sheen on the road ahead, a grim reflection upon which the SUV’s headlights danced and played.

Raylan was quiet, consumed by his own thoughts to the point that Tim's jokes went unremarked upon. To cover all his bases, Raylan finally said: “Tim, it ain't that I don't want your help."

A frown set over his mouth, paralleled itself to the lines drawn across his brown. He was lost again to his thoughts. 

"A man.... more upstanding... than myself might ask that you return to the office, throw the search team in a couple different directions, and let me do what it is that needs doing."

“But you? Less-than-upstanding man that you are?"

"Well, Tim. I ain't asking. I'm telling you." 

Tim resisted the urge to roll his eyes; Raylan's taste for theatrics sometimes felt to Tim like an act of gavage feeding. Unimpressed, he drawled, "Why don't you prod your pistol into my side a little, make sure I get the point."

When they arrived at Raylan’s house, the rain was there to greet them. It strummed down on the property, pinged off the shingled roof and fell flat against the lawn. 

Raylan exited the car, and was surprised when Tim followed suit, then walked ahead of him through the drizzling rain to the front porch.

“You comin’?”

They were barely a foot from the doorway. Tim was on his knees in a second, had Raylan’s jeans down the next. He took Raylan's still-flaccid cock in his mouth, played and teased until he was appropriately hard. After that, it was all a game. Tim took whatever weakened gestured and groans amused him until he'd stripped Raylan bare. 

It was cold out, the temperature dropping quickly with the rain and the dark, but by the time Tim had finished, Raylan was sweating.

"You want to give me a chance to improve my odds?" Raylan asked. He sounded breathless, as if he’d been using his own mouth for anything but the occasional groan or, as seemed likelier and likelier these days, if Tim had finished things with a well-placed gutpunch. But Raylan's grip alternatively loosened and tightened on the keys he’d retrieved from the counter by the door, and he had the all-around look of a man with better places to be.

“Not when your heart’s not in it,” Tim drawled, then took the liberty of adjusting Raylan himself. He drew up the man’s underpants and fastened his jeans. Tim was working studiously on the buckle when he next spoke. “You can owe me one,” he said, and a flicker of warning passed his face. He did intend on collecting. 

Raylan sighed and smiled, worked his right hand over with his left. It was clawed and aching because Raylan had used it to steady himself against the doorjamb. Unlike Tim’s, his own touch was far more forgiving.

“I think I might just miss this place,” he said, and cocked his head slightly to look at Tim, who was flicking open his jeans to deal with matters his own damn self. “How about a kiss for good luck?”

Between them spilled some disquieting truth only met in the dark. Raylan genuinely wanted the kiss, and believed he needed the luck.

Tim wiped his mouth, but didn’t offer it. 

“You’ll be lucky if you live to regret this.” 

\- 

For having not slept in two days and spending the afternoon dodging dynamite and swallowing back Army-speak, Tim felt alright. Boyd was cuffed and stuffed in the back of Rachel's car, and Tim was following at a distance. Their case was still intact and Raylan had his badge back--at Art's discretion, no less. He found some tunes on a local radio station that didn't twang louder than a mouthful of chew hitting a brass pot, and settled in. 

They might have been taking the last remaining Crowders out of Harlan County, forever changing the place, but there was nothing to be done for the long drive. 

Tim's phone rang, and he pulled it from his jacket pocket. 

It was a little early to be making congratulatory blowjob plans, but Tim wasn't about to say no.

“You calling to say good-bye? Making a break with Ava and the money while you can? You know this'll put a damper on our love affair. Aw, I'm hurt."

There was a beat of silence, a moment in time where Raylan was either slow on the draw or had nothing to say. It wasn’t right.

“Raylan’s been shot.” A girl's voice. _The_ girl. Tim had forgotten her name.

“Where--?”

“In the head," the girl interrupted, providing just a gasp of minimal detail that struck Tim like a deluge of senseless sounds, wherein each syllable was a terrible scream that rocked his conscience. 

"Where _are you--”_ Tim started to correct, but found himself faltering, choking on the words. Thoughtlessly, Tim threw on his brights, signaling twice to Rachel that she was on her own now, then pulled a U-turn. His phone felt hot against his face, and Tim realized he was gripping it hard in pursuit of an answer. “Is he dead?” _Or as good as?_

“N-no, he’s okay. There’s blood, but--”

"Loretta, sweetheart, you're gonna have to calm down. Tim? You hear me?" Raylan sounded distant, and it wasn't just him speaking up to be heard over his own phone. 

Tim swallowed loud hard, prompted only by the simple relief that Raylan’s voice was one he’d hear again.

“How bad is it?” Tim demanded, saving the well-deserved name-calling and shit talk for later. 

To Tim, Raylan said, “Well I ain’t sat at my vanity mirror, Tim." Then, away from the phone, “Loretta, you got a compact or something?” And finally back to Tim, “Can’t be too bad, she’s looking at me like I’m joking.”

It was ten grating seconds that didn't further Raylan's cause or Tim's knowledge of it. 

“Put her back on." If there was a firmness in Tim's voice, it was only learned behavior, because in that instance--asking after Loretta because he couldn't trust himself to hear Raylan lie--he felt entirely helpless.

“What do I do?” Loretta's plea echoed in Tim's ear; she was obviously cradling the phone close to her, desperate for instruction. Tim didn't disappoint her. 

“Keep him upright, keep him talking. Press something clean to the wound, but not too hard if it feels soft. Okay? Just try to stay the bleeding.”

“There’s a lot of blood.”

“Head wounds’ll do that," Tim said, like it was some kind of assurance. "Keep calm, I’m coming. Y'all took the pass?” 

He hung up, called for an ambulance and was assured they wouldn't be far behind him. 

"I need a helicopter," Tim specified. "We got teams out here, search and rescue. They're nearby, and I want one. I ain't shitting you, I want it buzzing in my ear when I end this call."

He thought about all the ways out of Harlan County, the main drags and the narrow means of fast escape. There weren't many, as Raylan was fond of saying. Money or death were the preferred routes. 

As he sped through the narrow and winding roads that carried him onto a hill, Tim spotted crows in the sky. There were seven of them, floating overheard as witnesses. He heard himself make a small, unintentional sound--a prayer, without all the formalities of words.

He spied his felled partner and the girl in the middle of the road. _Laid flat._ Raylan was _laid flat_ and Tim was convinced there was another set of circumstances wherein such positioning would have been an entertaining sight, because he felt a stab of guilt, seeing it now. 

It would hit him, later. The circumstance was, in fact, a memory. It was this: Raylan sprawled out in bed, still clothed because that's as far as they were going. His head thrown back in ecstasy, legs bent open, an arm thrown out in invitation for Tim to join him. 

Tim shot out of his car, graceful only in the sense that he was endowed with purpose, and no breath or step was unduly made. The door hung open after him, the keys abandoned on the seat. Tim skidded to a stop where Raylan was splayed out, longs legs hugged in denim, one arm wrenched back behind him like he’d tried to put his weight on it, pivot, and sit up. Loretta, pale-faced and mouth pressed shut, was holding Raylan’s head steady in her lap. Her eyes were red, but she’d shed no tears. 

Her hair shifted, like a sheet pulling back when she raised her head and watched Tim's hurried approach. 

"Good girl," Tim greeted her, but his eyes were trained on Raylan. "You did great. Here, we're gonna switch places, you and me. Nice and slow. Sure him up, huh? I got his head." 

Loretta shuffled against the pavement. The denim of her jeans dragged but her hands kept steady, and Tim eventually took her place. His fingers slid into the bloodied mess at Raylan’s hairline, and Tim held his breath. He was careful not to disturb what was done to him, much less inflict more damage. 

Tim's movements were slow, deliberate, each considered from Raylan's point of view, first, and Tim's level of comfort, subsequent. Tim made his body into a groove against which Raylan could settle and relax; it was a position from which Tim knew he could quickly hook his arms under Raylan's, and drag him to safety if Boon shot up from the dirt, zombified and trigger-happy. With his smaller body crowding Raylan's, they were like a car collided into a tree. Raylan was the force of nature, here, and Tim the intruder. 

But theirs was a grotesque picture of reversed carnage. 

Loretta stood with her hands forked out at her sides, not sure of what to do. Her shirt and jacket were smeared with blood where Raylan had rested against her. There was a smudge of blood over her lip, too, like she'd pressed her nose into Raylan's hair to lend him comfort. It was a sentimental move, one Tim recognized but couldn't blame her for. Raylan, despite every hard thing about him, inspired such egregious acts of loyalty and love.

Tim saw past her and down the road to where Boon lay dead or dying, his fancy pistol strewn some feet away from his groping, ring-adorned hand. Tim didn't need a closer look; he knew the shot Raylan got off was center mass, like he was taught, like he knew from experience to be most effective. 

Contrary to his looks and style, the way he could string together a threat or pull of some addle-minded stunt like it had come to him on the spot, Raylan was all substance. Results--not justice--were his cause. _Justice_ would have seen Boon with his pecker blown off for preying on Loretta like he had.

Head-shots, though, were Tim's game. He figured how Boon missed right off: Raylan wore his hat loosely, with a kind of humor and ease Boon didn't understand or wasn't wise enough to recognize. With time to watch a man--something Tim always tried to have, accumulate as best he could, or else make up for in skill--Boon might have known that. 

Raylan’s blood still ran warm because Boon’s skill and knowledge was accumulated, not taught. Tim’s far more effective head-shots were sanctioned by Congress. The distinction lent Tim the greater staying power; for Boon, there was only so much crime a fella could get away with, especially after crossing paths with Raylan Givens. 

When Raylan started to wriggle and issue short, angry muttering a that he was fine, Tim helped him sit up. Raylan accepts Tim’s support, initially, only to back into him further. He twisted at the waist and Tim thought he was starting to fade, so he held him tighter. Raylan had essentially positioned himself for a hug. 

Tim had to resist the urge to drop him altogether when he realized Raylan meant to scoot back and collect his ruined, discarded hat.

Tim felt his anger like blood pushing into frozen parts of a body--it stung and burned a path. 

“Have you got any fucking sense at all, Raylan?” Tim hissed, his voice sad and ragged, “That’s fucking evidence. Drop it.”

Tim secured Raylan again, and took stock of what he saw: changes in pupil size, blood seeping from one nostril, discoloration and rapid bruising along Raylan’s hairline. At the back of his head a goose egg was forming--Tim could feel it like an outcropping of stone, slowly expanding--and he suspected a skull fracture from the strength of Raylan’s fall. The flesh there felt soft under his hands, almost pulpy. Tim kept his voice even and low when he told Loretta to start down the road, keep an eye out for either the ambulance or helicopter, and to flag down whichever she saw first. 

“Helicopter?” Raylan asked, a little delayed. “I’m fine--”

“You got shot.”

“I know that much, Tim.”

“Your right pupil is blown. Just the right.” Tim dragged his thumb across Raylan's eyebrow, and for a moment Raylan thought it was meant to be a kind gesture. But Tim followed up with his index finger, lower, and forced Raylan's eye open so that he could get a better look. 

Raylan attempted to swat Tim's hand away, but poor coordination was the conjoined twin to his blown pupil.

“Weren’t we talking earlier, ‘bout blowing things?”

“And now your mind is going,” Tim said, angry but hopeful. Then he frowned, noticing that Raylan's left eye was not without damage: bright red was creeping into the white, a telltale sign of a subconjunctival hemorrhage. Nothing on its own, but surely worth a second take in conjunction with shock and trauma. Tim watched the color bleed out, circle Raylan's pretty brown eye like chummed water. Raylan closed his eyes.

“Keep talking to me,” Tim ordered.

Tim tracked movement behind the lids, but Raylan didn’t open his eyes again. Tim stretched an arm out and collected the hat he'd made Raylan discard just moments earlier. Tim set in on Raylan's chest where he could get to it, touch its wide brim. It was nothing short of placating a rowdy child with a prize. 

“Thought we were done talking,” he said, and blood from his nose trickled down to color his lips. Tim’s touch _was_ gentle, then, when he moved to smudge the blood, keep it from draining into Raylan’s mouth.

“You’re an asshole,” Tim said, because of course Raylan would capitalize on any excuse to torment and tease his partner. “We could have really had something here.”

He heard Loretta shout for their attention, and an ambulance come to a screeching halt some yards away. Raylan didn’t once stir to attention. There was a flurry of hands and words exchanged-- _where the fuck is my helicopter?_ \--as Raylan was loaded onto a gurney, secured, and hoisted into the care of professionals. 

Tim had it twice confirmed to him that a helicopter would meet the ambulance at the bottom of the hill, where there was enough flat space for it to make a landing. Tim wanted to challenge that there wasn’t a helo pilot alive who couldn’t narrow in on their location, but held his tongue, supposing instead that they simply ran in different circles. The double doors shut and the ambulance went racing off the way it came, sirens screaming. Tim, eager to chase after it, nearly forgot Loretta. 

She was standing off to one side of the road, lost in her coat, looking damn near helpless. It was one hell of a disguise. There was blood down her arms, soaked heavy into her shirt. She seemed unbothered by it, and even touched her hair with her stained fingers.

Tim didn’t want to put so much distance between himself and the ambulance, but he’d already inserted himself on the scene. He couldn’t now shirk his duties, no matter how he came upon them. 

Tim sighed and approached her, their bloodied shirts a matching pair.

“You need a ride home?”

She gave him a hard look. “Ain’t you following him?”

“I’d like to.”

“So let’s do that, then.”

She climbed up into the passenger seat, and something about her reminded Tim of Cassie St. Cyr, whose life got caught up with Boyd's plans and suffered for it. No one--save perhaps for the hulking Choo-Choo--looked particularly comfortable in Tim's enormous rig, but these women, who weathered through all that Harlan used to destroy lesser souls, looked especially out of place. Like they understood wherever the SUV was heading, it wasn't getting them out of anything.

Tim stared down the road, glad the ambulance had already sped out of sight. Only then did he chance a second look at his company. 

Loretta's hair hung limp over her shoulders, but what was a girl to do? She’d been held captive by drug dealers. Tim noticed she was picking at the ends, and realized they’d dragged through Raylan’s wound, and had knotted together with his blood. 

There were wet-naps in the glove compartment, as well as a four-inch hunting knife. Tim didn’t know which a girl like Loretta would take, but he had something of an inkling. Because he didn’t want to be responsible for Raylan’s surrogate daughter hacking off her hair, Tim said nothing.

Glancing at her, though, like he had, stirred conversation nonetheless.

“He had a gun on me,” Loretta said, still pinching the ends of her hair between her forefinger and thumbnail, and dragging the latter. Little curls of blood came away like peeled paint. “Boon. I know you’re thinkin’ I’m in on this but I sure as hell ain’t.”

“I don’t think that.” 

Truthfully, Tim didn’t know what to think. They had Boyd and Ava, Markham got what he deserved, his lackeys were in the ground, and Wynn Duffy was in the wind. It all seemed as right as things could get, until it fell vastly and completely apart. Tim couldn’t imagine what Raylan was thinking, letting Ava ride in front. A last stab at dignity, maybe. A guilty conscience, certainly. Love?

Whatever Raylan was thinking then, it didn’t much matter now. Tim settled into the drive, all the while glancing upwards for the promised helicopter. When he finally spied it taking off, Tim felt something in his chest come undone. He tracked its progress across the goldening sky and breathed, finally. And was relieved. 

It was only when Tim couldn’t see it anymore that he was able to draw his focus closer to home, and found the sense to try again with Loretta. “Why don’t you tell me what happened, and when we get to the hospital I’ll talk to the cops and you can keep an eye on Raylan.” 

He thought that was what Raylan would want--someone protecting his young protector. Tim eyed her like he didn’t already know, and asked, “You’re still a minor, right? Milk that shit. It don't last."

She nodded and told of the ordeal from her ringside view. 

That was how it sounded to Tim, anyway. That Raylan and Boon had been trading lead positions in this particular dance for some time wasn’t a surprise to him. In fact, Tim foresaw plenty of time to be wasted beating himself over for it. He’d seen Boon’s vicious, hungry interest firsthand. A roadside duel was no great leap from the stalking and baiting Tim had witnessed, grinned at, _joked about._

Loretta drew in a shaky breath; Tim heard it cut past her teeth and sink down her throat. She was anxious and afraid, and Tim wanted to tell her he felt it, too. 

“It really ain’t bad," he promised her. "The bump he got from falling backwards’ll probably do him worse.”

“How bad is the bump?”

Tim found he didn’t know this girl well enough to lie to her effectively. He tightened his grip on the wheel, sent the speedometer reeling, and said, “Pretty bad.”

\- 

Raylan was well awake when Tim was finally able to enter his room. He was slurping from a juice box and browsing messages on his phone, the latest being word from Rachel that Boyd was successfully in lock-up and under heavy surveillance. 

[Mine], she clarified, which was really all Raylan needed to hear.

He carried a sort of God-given masculine resolve, even under the guise of a hospital gown. It was somewhat attributed to his height, which resulted in one bare leg thrown sideways out of the bed, bent at the knee, with the sheets drawn up to cover anything worth seeing. There was gauze wrapped snug around his head, and he’d lost his jeans somewhere between getting patched up and jumping the queue for a CAT scan. Along with his shirt and jacket, they were folded and sat in the only available chair in the room, which left Tim standing awkwardly in the middle of the room. 

Tim waited silently for a moment, looking over his partner while Raylan struggled to tear his attention from his phone. 

Tim asked, “You need anything from your place? Either place.” 

It was a wholly innocuous statement, and of course it meant nothing like Tim was saying. And it did the trick; Raylan set his phone down on the small tray table to his right, then looked at Tim and nowhere else. 

“Somehow, tragically, I ain’t in the mood.” 

Tim took a step forward and Raylan sat himself up a little straighter. He continued with the mounting evidence as to why he didn’t deserve what Tim was offering: “She got away. Because of me.”

“Well, you’ve got a good excuse," Tim said, because Raylan wasn't wrong. People weren't saying that now, but they would. The blame and bitterness would gather in the coming days when, still, Ava Crowder evaded arrest. 

Tim fiddled with Raylan’s hat, which was sat atop his abandoned clothes. The hole through the crown was a spectacular thing Tim hadn’t appreciated when he first saw the hat, shot clear off Raylan’s head and drifting along the road.

"Where's Loretta?" In his attempt to raise it, Raylan’s voice emerged as a croak. He grimaced and went for the juice box again. 

"Asleep in the nurse's station. Unless that was just a ploy to get close to the pharmaceuticals, in which case I'd say she's got a three hour head start back to Harlan."

"She does appreciate a fresh product,” Raylan agreed. He sucked down more Cherry Berry Blast.

Tim disappeared his hands into his jacket pockets, and he glanced back at the door as expecting intruders. "Is her story true?" 

Raylan raised an eyebrow. With the gauze headband in its path, it didn’t get far. "That my secret admirer had a pistol trained on her? That I told her to stay in the car and get down while I had myself an old fashioned shoot-out? That Ava took the wheel and made herself scarce the second I hit the pavement?" Raylan drained his juice box. "Any of that read as unusual to you?" 

"Sadly, no." Tim took another step forward, swiped the empty drink box and tossed it in the trash bin. 

Raylan nodded, then left it at that. "Any word on Ava?"

"She ditched your car and her cuffs, disappeared."

"On foot? She back in the hills?"

"All signs point to... No. She got a ride." Tim shrugged, and the gesture looked bone-tired to match Tim’s eyes and slouched posture. "She's in the wind, Raylan." 

Something clicked in Tim’s presentation, like he was caught off guard by a wild haymaker that, despite its force, still only breezed past him. It was the demonstration that alarmed him, not some understood intent. Tim cocked his head slightly, and as the unwitting point of interest himself, Raylan was lost as to why such a look should cross Tim’s features.

"Maybe it's the head wound, but you don't seem too sorry to hear it." 

_Ah,_ Raylan thought. It was a lesson he seemed to be learning twice over: you could trade blowjobs with a man, but still not earn his trust.

"It ain't the head wound.”

Tim glanced back at the door again, then to Raylan. His face betrayed nothing like what he was thinking. "Did you plan something?" 

Tim had a knack for these sorts of questions--the kind where he innocuously asked after Raylan's greatest misdeeds. _Did you kill him? You kill anybody? I guess that’ll be up to him, won’t it, Raylan?_

More than Raylan cared to admit, Tim was on to something. He was relieved this wasn’t one of those times and that he could answer honestly: "When, during all this, would I have had time to plan _fuck all?"_

"Nothing elaborate. Maybe she tugged at your heart strings in the car."

"She tried to bribe me, actually."

"Heart strings, pursestrings, whatever." 

“No, Tim.”

Raylan breathed quietly for a time. Tim thought it sounded like death, somehow, still.

"Does Winona know?"

 _Shit,_ Tim thought. 

"Shit," Tim said. It was protocol to contact a law enforcement officer’s next of kin--or whatever Winona was to Raylan, now--but Tim hadn’t realized that responsibility had fallen to him. "No. Not unless Art called her. I'll--" 

"Don't," Raylan said. "I don't want her worried after nothing. Flying on up here, even. She'd probably want you to leave the room... In the middle of the handjob you're giving me, in this here scenario."

Tim rolled his eyes and looked at the wall above Raylan's head. "You got an active imagination, there. Probably a good sign." 

“Told you, I’m fine.” 

Tim's gaze dragged from the wall, to Raylan, to the drooping bed sheets, and finally to the floor. “A duel,” he said, smirking. “Christ. You’re a sore winner.”

Raylan stretched his bare leg out like he wanted a very specific vein of Tim's attention. “It wasn’t up to me, entirely.”

“Raylan,” Tim sighed, “I know you like having _Art_ think you can be cowed into anything. I also know _you_ know that’s bullshit.”

Raylan frowned. “What are we talking about, here?”

“Still the shoot-out,” Tim said. “When we get to the subject of your wayward cock, I’ll be sure to point.”

“Wayward ain’t the term. It’s adventurous.” 

“Slutty.”

“Amiable.” 

Tim snorted. “Feel like I’m getting my ass kicked at Scrabble again. That honor belongs to yourself, and one Boyd Crowder.”

Raylan grinned wide, like he knew precisely that mistake. Had made it, on occasion. “Oh, Tim.”

Tim shrugged. “I didn’t think he could spell all those big words he uses.”

“Speaking of,” Raylan grimaced, and mentally groped for a topic that wasn’t him. He rarely strayed from that, his own best source of reference, but now the situation demanded it. He was hit, lucky as he was to avoid the near-death sentence. And he’d lost his hat--a small death in itself. Coming away with a clear bill of health wasn't in the cards for him, yet, but it was imminent. It was the blood and the bruises that earned him all the attention, however. Men with nothing to show for their troubles tended to get overlooked. 

“Haven’t asked about our day. Dynamite, huh?”

Tim smiled weakly, and gave a single, near-indecipherable nod. "You missed a hell of a show."

"I bet." Raylan watched for something--he didn't know what. He knew Tim had issues, but there never seemed a precedent for his needing to know any more than was necessary in a fix. Like that Kentucky highway IED that still got talked about like it was the fucking Alamo--maybe Tim saw IEDs everywhere he went. Maybe it was just the one time that counted. 

Raylan thought now, though, he ought to care a little if something was tearing Tim apart inside.

"Anyone hurt?" Raylan asked, not caring so much because he already knew his people were safe, but it was a safe stab towards what he was really after. 

Tim sighed and started ticking off what he knew: "Couple of fellas from the search teams got rattled, maybe some temporary hearing damage, there. Lexington PD guy might lose a toe. One of the sniffer dogs took off.” Tim shrugged his arms out at his sides. “Tragedies, all.” 

Raylan smiled, unsure what was to be believed in Tim's carnage countdown. "Let me know the damage when it's all said and done, and I'll send my best from Miami."

The gunshot cut into the grey at Raylan's temple. Tim didn't want to say he looked younger for it, but it didn't hurt matters none, either. 

"What about what you promised me, huh?" Tim paired the comment with a wide grin, so Raylan could take it for a joke if that's what he needed to do. It'd save them both the embarrassment of Tim asking twice. 

“You want a blowjob from my sickbed?”

Tim pressed his open palm down against one corner of the hospital bed, testing its cushion and durability. “It reclines, don’t it?”

“Why don’t you just feed it in through a tube, then.”

“Lacks the personal touch.” Tim absently touched his forefinger along Raylan’s arm, drawing it from Raylan’s white hospital band to his elbow.

“You don’t,” Raylan said, quick with the retort but slow in its delivery. He sounded tired, a shade worse, even, than he had over the phone while explaining away a GSW. Reality--and consequence--was dragging hard against him. He hadn't answered Tim's request either way, which was as much a decline as any firmly worded _no._ Tim had to accept it, then: the fantasy was over. 

Tim tried to be inconspicuous when drawing his hand back, but felt as though he might as well have signaled his retreat with a wailing bugle solo. He slipped his hands back into his jacket pockets, and spoke without any acknowledgement of the conversation that had gone before it: “Everybody’s en route to Lexington. Art was gonna haul ass back here but I told him I had you covered, and that you got a bigger story than you did a headache out of this thing.”

Raylan blinked. Tim's departure was abrupt, but not unexpected. “I dunno. This is a pretty awful fucking headache.”

“Pulsing pain or dull? Throbbing--?”

“I’m kidding,” Raylan waved a hand, dismissing his own comments and accepting Tim's. "Hell of a good story."

"I know I'll be telling it," Tim agreed. No sooner had he spoken did something alight his features and he turned, left to retrieve something he'd left in a chair outside the room, and did not bother to close the door behind him when he returned to Raylan's exclusive company. The thing was--inexplicably--Boon's hat, still in its evidence bag. Tim presented it with all the reverence of the decapitated head of an enemy. "Thought you could use a loaner.” 

He pulled the hat out of its plastic casing, and handed it to Raylan for approval. 

“Where’d you get this?”

Tim pointed to the lettering on the empty bag. “E… vi… dence,” he read, slowly. “You sure that bullet ain’t still lodged in your brain somewhere?”

Raylan turned the thing over in his hands, tracing the width of the brim. “You steal it?”

“Yeah, you must inspire that in people," Tim drawled. "Local PD bagged it, left it in the back seat of a squad car. Right out in the open, really."

"You shimmy in there and snatch it for me?"

"To say I shimmied gives the wrong impression." Tim threw a look back at the door. He'd left it open for a reason. He glanced back at Raylan and was reminded why it was such a gamble taking his eyes off the man in the first place. 

"Stitches, dumbass--" Tim started to say, but Raylan had already sat up entirely and drew on the hat. 

“Well. It fits.” It looked good, too. Different, but not without its charm.

“And what more, really, can we ask?” 

The gift, its acceptance, and the compliment were all hung out like dirty laundry between them. There were still more realities settled in that both men chose to smile over, rather than observe. It _was_ a dead man's hat. Tim _had_ stolen it. An even trade or not, Raylan's capacity to pull it off _or not_ \--these were the things that shredded yet another fantasy. 

And in seeing what they had again done for one another, Tim wanted--inexplicably needed--to come clean. To admit that the thought of losing Raylan--after what they'd been doing, certainly, but simply as a matter of fact--was crushing him. And so he was here with jokes and a replacement hat with the tried and true notion that he could cope with those terrible shakes of fear and sinking dread he still felt churning through his body like a toxin. He needed to admit that he hoped seeing Raylan would take the fire out of those feelings, but was realizing, instead, that there was no getting rid of them. Tim would fear for and dread Raylan for the rest of his life. 

Tim said only, “I wish I’d kissed you.”

It was not what Raylan expected to hear--that being, something crass and useless and only spoken to muddy the waters after what they’d done. This was, instead, a backwards step into their mutually purchased fantasy. It somehow excited Raylan more than the promise of a blowjob ever had, because Raylan liked being wanted--had earned a BOLO before his name like an honorific, even, as such was the case. 

So Raylan smiled and welcomed the admission, even if it was just another thing neither man would end up holding to the other. Sexual favors, affection--it was all exchanged piecemeal, like illicit goods traveling without detection. 

“I think I got plenty lucky, nonetheless."

Raylan took the hat off and set it on the nearby tray table. He scratched absently at his throat, where the hairs stood over-sharp and in need of a shave. He studied Tim’s weary posture and, draped over it, his grey shirt. It was slack with wear, ruined with blood. Raylan frowned, thinking that was unfair. And it finally struck him, then, that it wasn’t a theoretical spilling of blood, it was his own. 

"You ever think you have a... duty. To another person."

"No." Tim shifted uncomfortably. "I get the premise, but. No. Not yet."

Raylan grinned knowingly. "Ah, but you're hopeful."

"You thinking about your little girl?" Tim asked. More than hopeful, he was perceptive. It tended to kill hope on the spot. "Or Winona...?" 

"They both come to mind."

"Ava? Boyd? Stop me when I get there. If you've slept with LeeAnn in HR, I don't want to know about that."

"Aw, LeeAnn's a sweetheart." Raylan closed his eyes for a moment, resting. It made Tim uneasy, and he looked away. "I'm thinking of Loretta, actually. Along with LeeAnn, not someone I've slept with." 

"You have a duty to Loretta McCready," Tim surmised, doubtful. “You realize she called me, but _I_ called the ambulance, right?”

But Raylan was incessant; there was more to be done for Loretta under his name. "I tried to get her to leave this place. Fall in with her foster family, know that life instead. But she came back here." Again, Raylan fell silent and again, Tim felt it like a death chill. He sighed, and gave his own eulogy: "I'm going to Florida."

It was Raylan’s goal all along to escape Kentucky like he had, before, and Tim didn’t fool himself into thinking he stood as any great obstacle. To hear that a sixteen-year-old girl was a cut above him, though, admittedly stung.

"You want me to keep an eye on her," Tim intuited. 

Raylan shook his head. "It will never be that simple."

"Sounds real simple,” Tim reasoned. "You want me to do what you'd do."

"I can't ask that," Raylan said, finally speaking to the full breadth of what a life like his was, spoiled with the choices he'd made and the causes he championed. He spoke for the two bullet wounds he'd amassed in his short Kentucky stint, as well as the lives he'd taken and sacrificed along the way.

Tim looked at the floor. He felt a little like the discarded dead on that path, himself. "We don't have to talk about it." 

Raylan unwittingly laughed. “Just another of those things you do for me, huh?” 

It was meant to be a joke--Raylan would never ask Tim to take up Loretta’s cause--but Tim blushed, embarrassed to hear Raylan say so plainly what it was Tim meant to do.

Raylan had to wonder, now, where it was he got the idea he had such a keen, investigative eye when shit like this ran rampant through his life. In the last few weeks alone, Ava double crossed him, Winona claimed to want him, and Tim had genuine feelings. Feeling about _Raylan,_ no less. 

The realizations kept coming: Any regulations per their activities were kept in place for Tim’s benefit, not to Raylan’s detriment. Tim, a self-proclaimed gambling man, inexplicably saw a sure thing in Raylan, who had everything to lose. And, perhaps most charmingly of all, Tim could so easily be led astray by a nice smile and a confident stride. How many laws had he broken at Raylan’s behest in the past twenty-four hours? Raylan would do the math one day, sort the details and find the proper sums, but at present he already had himself an answer.

“You really like me.”

Tim had a face like he always wanted to do something brutal, or short of that, say something devastating. It was disorientating, then, to hear him untangle sweet words from his twisted mouth. 

“Yeah. I do.” It was an admission of guilt, honest but not remorseful.

Raylan nodded. “I’m profoundly sorry about that.”

"Yeah?" It was some small consolation. 

“Yeah.” Raylan looked surprised--then sorry--to hear exhaustion in his voice, not resolve. "I’d like to think I could be man enough to like you, too."

Tim scrubbed a hand over his face like he was searching for the right expression--humiliation, bemusement, pleasure. When it came away he was, genuinely or not, sporting a wry grin. "Let's just be glad it never came to that." 

Without a second’s hesitation, Raylan reached out, found the side of the chair and lifted it, causing his neat pile of clothes to fall to the floor. He gestured for Tim to sit. Wary, Tim did. Only when they were level did Raylan pull forward and close the space between them. 

“I ain’t so much for a dick in my mouth, Tim, but there are certain things I do thoroughly enjoy.” His hand found the base of Tim’s skull and, like Tim had done for him, Raylan held him together. They kissed-- a Raylan-led initiative, spurned to action because _goddamn,_ Tim looked like he sure wanted it.

\- 

They agreed: Tim would take Loretta home, crash at the house while Raylan was kept under observation for the night, and they’d drive back to Lexington together in the morning.

In the hospital, Tim didn’t have to go looking for Loretta. She made herself found, refusing a kindly nurse’s offer of a clean shirt.

“I don’t need a shirt. Look, I’m wearing a shirt.”

“I got her,” Tim said, flashing his tin and a smile for the nurse. “Taking her to a whole… world of shirts.” 

He took her to a Steak ‘n Shake, instead. They got burgers, dumped their fries into one paper bag and fed from it like starved animals. 

“So what’s the count?” Loretta asked, her first words since those she hollered over Tim at the drive-through window: _And a rootbeer float!_

Tim sipped from his soda. “The _body_ count, Loretta? Innocent child of sixteen tender years?” 

“I’d like to know what I write with my sparkle pen into my diary is factually correct.”

“Yeah, me too.” Tim wiped his mouth with a napkin and considered the facts. “Boyd killed Markham and two of his cops-for-hire types.” 

“And Boyd?”

“Raylan brought him in. Alive.”

“No shit?”

“I was just as surprised as you,” Tim drawled. “Pissed, too. Shithead threw dynamite at us. Plus, didn't clean his mess. I stepped in a guy.” 

Loretta finished her float and--without a second thought--went for Tim’s soda. She stuck her own straw in as consolation. “You ain’t from around here, are you?”

“Because I’m averse to being the target of a couple sticks of dynamite, I must be some city slicker?” 

“No, ‘cause that _guy you stepped in_ is still on your shoe.” She pointed to what looked like a grease stain on Tim’s sand-colored boot. Blood looked that way on concrete floors, too. Not in dirt, however, where it seeped and held its shape for longer. Smartly, she added, “Harlan boys at least know to wipe down.”

It was something of an oversight, Tim had to admit. “And Harlan girls?”

Loretta turned her chin up, said, “We look ahead to where it is we’re walking.” 

“Seems to have paid off for you and Ava both.”

It was an offhand comment--a compliment, even--but Loretta took swift and fierce objection to it.

“Just ‘cause we ain’t dead or in jail, somehow that makes us winners?” she snapped, then gestured to Tim’s boot again. “Ava’s Uncle Zachariah, I presume. I ain’t got no kin left, neither. Men thinking their plans is bigger than mine… come in and take ‘em all from me.” 

Tim opened his mouth to apologize, but closed it, thinking better of swaying Loretta with an empty, sympathetic word.

“You’ve seen what having family around here means for a person.” He started slow, hoping his own simple observations would lead the angry young woman to find reason. “Alliances to hell and gone, blood feuds spanning generations. If you really mean to stay--and from what Raylan’s told me, you stayin’ means you conquering--then, good. Stay. And be the one person around here who ain't fooled by all that shit.”

“Did I just get an officer of the law’s blessing on my weed business?”

“Whatever you’re doing out in those godforsaken hills is no business of mine. So long as you don’t harbor fugitives. Or murder, like. Too much.”

“Too much murder is bad for business,” Loretta agreed. Her tone was solemn, not a hint of irony to her words. Tim knew Katherine Hale had died, but--

Long live Loretta McCready. 

Tim coughed to clear his throat, then extended his index finger from the wheel and pointed out a sign along Loretta’s side of the road. “Outlet mall coming up. You want that new shirt?”

“Can’t say I much want to go shopping with a Deputy U.S. Marshal,” she drawled, and went on to remark that Tim’s own shirt was inside out and backwards. It was something she’d first noticed at the hospital, hours ago. “It don’t inspire much confidence.” 

“Well, think about it. We stopped for gas, for dinner… I can’t be seen driving a young girl around town, my shirt covered in blood.”

“But I can be that girl?”

Tim shrugged. “You got a built-in excuse.”

It wasn’t quite how menstruation worked, but he’d helped her keep Raylan alive and paid for dinner, so Loretta let it slide.

"There's one, actually,” Tim hooked a thumb over his shoulder, “On top of a case of water. Under the seat behind you."

"Weird," Loretta mumbled, but wrenched back and took both the shirt and a bottle of water for herself. 

"Old habits," Tim said, though that didn’t explain anything as far as she could tell. 

She shrugged off her jacket and pulled on the too-large blue crew-neck shirt over her bloodstained attire, wriggled her arms through the sleeves and wrenched the whole thing out, over her head. She tossed the bundle into the empty burger bag. 

“Happy?” Loretta said, though she was admittedly glad to escape the itchy feeling of dried blood grating over her skin. 

“Immeasurably. Fifteen years from now when Raylan’s trying to get his little girl to change outta her own bloodstained, attempted-murder outfits, I can be the voice of experience.” 

“You think Raylan’s gonna remember you in fifteen years?” It came out unduly sharp, but Tim didn’t take offense. Rather, he saw it as an answer Loretta desperately wanted for herself. 

And Tim didn’t feel like he was lying to her when he said, “I think when you hold a man’s head together like we did, you get grandfathered in on the Christmas card list.” 

The hills grew steadily larger and darker as they left the highway for the narrow road into Harlan County. Tim wondered if he ought to have asked if this was even where Loretta wanted to go--back to a home that had been invaded, a life that had been threatened. They were kind considerations, the likes of which Loretta would have sooner spat upon than heard in full. Tim remembered Raylan’s failed attempts to guide her path, the distrust it would inevitably foster, and he said nothing.

Loretta fiddled with the plastic cap to her bottled water. For a long time they both appreciated the silence. “My daddy was kind. Stupid, though.” 

Tim knew they weren’t talking about fathers; in some roundabout way, they were talking about Raylan. He returned, “I guess that’s not the worst you can say of a man.” 

Loretta cut to the chase: “Raylan’s not so stupid. Not so kind, neither.”

“If you’re waiting for a counterargument, it’s gonna be a quiet ride.” 

It was. 

They arrived at Loretta’s place in total darkness. The porch light flickered to life when they stepped close enough, buzzed quietly while Loretta unlocked her front door. The place looked free of intruders, but Tim followed her inside all the same. He cased the place and was satisfied. Moreso, too, when he circled back to the kitchen entrance and found Loretta testing the weight of knives, and selecting one she’d sleep with under her mattress. 

The house reminded Tim of Raylan’s--it was spacious, a dining room and a parlor at opposite ends of the first floor. Loretta didn’t move about quite like she knew the place, yet. She stalled at the part of the kitchen counter that protruded outwards like a bar, but was too far from the liquor cabinet to double for one. It was the Bennett household, bought right out from under them courtesy of Loretta’s ingenuity and weed money. Tim wished there was a way for Loretta to understand that they’d all been there, had all taken over the material remains of their oppressors. Raylan tried to burn it down, but in the end had to give it away. Tim’s potential little fortune was rusted into oblivion at the bottom of a lake.

Tim hoped Loretta had it right, and that by wasting the Bennett name she could reclaim her own. He doubted it, though. 

“He tell you to keep an eye on me, now that he’s leaving?”

“He didn’t ask,” Tim said, and that was the truth, “But I told him I would. Not that I think you need it, but. Seemed like he wanted to ask.” 

“He really going to Miami?”

“He really is.” _Sad_ wasn’t the term for what Tim didn’t even _feel,_ anyway, about Raylan’s imminent departure. But his voice did a hell of a job convincing any listener otherwise. 

Loretta leaned against the kitchen counter, her chosen knife in hand. If Tim was concerned about anything at all in this situation, it was the thoughtful look on her face. “What is he? With you.”

“A friend,” Tim said, but found it harder to lie to the girl now that he'd sworn his protection. “Or something like.” 

With the knife held expertly steady, Loretta started neatly cutting her hair. Tim had to turn, hide his stupid smile lest he be forced to explain it.

Loretta spoke while she sheared the blood from the ends of her hair. "You know, I seen you around town these past couple weeks. I didn't know what for, but I reckoned it was Boyd Crowder, and that it's done now."

She was asking after Tim’s availability, or else testing his commitment. Tim found that, realistically, he still couldn’t deny her. “Boyd ain’t the only criminal in Harlan.”

Loretta, careless with the knife, threw out her arms. _“Thank you._ Christ, a little recognition. _Finally.”_

\- 

Raylan was sat at his desk smelling like sweat and baby powder in all the wrong places. Miami was nothing like he remembered it to be, where the only baby powder was bought and sold by idiot criminals as cocaine, and sweat was a reward for a fruitful chase. 

But the sweat was a welcome trade for the sun, and the baby powder--when liberally applied to his beautiful baby daughter--was its own reward. And in that same vein, Raylan was used to a scuffle, even if losing was still good and far behind him. Willa was a big believer in life lessons, the first of which was merciless humility. There was even a day last month where Raylan went to work with still-warm spit up down his back and, worse, simply slipped on his suit jacket over top of it for his court appearance. 

His phone buzzed and, with the day he was having, Raylan imagined any number of things to be imminently bothered by: word from one of his confidential informants he was leaning on; an invitation to a wet lunch Raylan would begrudgingly have to turn down; an invitation for drinks after work he’d cling to so as to get through the dull, sweltering day.

It was none of the above. It was something infinitely better: a friend talking shit.

[I went to your house and its full of the hills have eyes people]  
[whats up with that]

Raylan wrote back immediately: [Hope you didn’t say that to their faces]

Tim had. 

[each more potato than the last]  
[so?]

[What were you doing at my house?]

[was running down a CI in Harlan. had to take an angry shit and thought of u] 

[That’s very sweet]  
[LOng story about the hill people. Come to Miami sometime and I’ll tell you the whole sordid tale] 

[subtle invite to go 1,000 miles to suck a dick]

Raylan grinned at that. Eyeballing the clock, he decided 11am wasn’t too early to break for lunch.

[thought it was worth a try]  
[hope you’re not wanting for cock so bad that you went trolling for phantom blowjobs]

[just the excellent ones I gave]

Raylan wrote back [I haven’t had as good since], deleted it twice, then sent it anyway. He didn’t receive the fast-paced response he’d grown accustomed to and did, eventually, settle for a pre-lunch vanilla cone. Tim got him back while he was first biting into the cone. 

[tragic]  
[also an excellent argument for you coming up here] 

[1,000 miles to get my dick sucked?]

[best you’ve ever had, though]

[I never said that]  
[there's always room for improvement] 

After finishing his ice cream, Raylan returned to the small, portable stand and bought an overpriced bottle of water. He didn’t take so much as a sip. In fact, the bottle would turn up under his desk a month later, still unopened. He was stalling, plain and simple. Tim, it seemed, appeared to be waiting him out.

Raylan drew his hat off and felt the full force of the high, blistering Miami sun. He swept his hair back and fit it back into place. He no longer thought of the hat as borrowed or stolen. It was earned in some respects, but above all, it was a gift.

[so]  
[Kentucky]  
[your place or mine?]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there it is! I hope it was enjoyable :)
> 
> I'd like to be more active on [tumblr](http://wellhellolazlo.tumblr.com/), so hit me up!


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